Stop Making Cases Against Latinx, Start Making Cases for Gender Equity

Every few months my social media explodes with debates related to the increasing use of the term Latinx as a gender neutral alternative to Latino. Most often it is prompted by rediscovery of this case against Latinx published a few years ago or a more recent article making similar arguments. I have been surprised at how often people share these articles as if they are making a useful contribution to the debate over developing more inclusive language. In reality, these cases against Latinx are usually trolling women and non-binary people while hiding behind seemingly woke language.

There are five major critiques of Latinx that I have gathered from these various cases against Latinx. While they may seem reasonable at face-value, on closer scrutiny they point to the real agenda of most of these cases against Latinx—to derail discussions of the ways that patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies are reproduced through language by suggesting that the term Latinx is the problem as opposed to patriarchy and heteronormativity. I will examine each of these critiques below and point to their major flaws.

Latinx was a term developed in the US that is being imposed on Latin America. I have seen this argument resonate with many people conscious of the long history of US imperialism in Latin America that continues today. That said, debates about how to make Spanish more inclusive also has a long history in Latin America that continues today. In fact, there is strong evidence that suggests that the term Latinx actually emerged in Latin America. Whether it did or not, the fact of the matter is that it isnow used within feminist and queer communities throughout Latin America. To, therefore, suggest that the term is somehow a tool of US imperialism is to erase the many women and non-binary people living in Latin America who use the term as part of broader efforts at demanding equal rights

The term is unpronounceable in Spanish. It is true that the pronunciation of the term is in a state of flux. I have heard Latin-ex, Lateen-ex, and Lateen-equis. I am sure that there are also other variations as well. That said, I have never come across a Spanish speaker who wanted to use the term who was not able to pronounce it in a way that was functional for their purposes—namely identifying themselves as connected to a broader political movement for gender equality. In addition, this argument is irrelevant to describing the use of Latinx among bilingual/English speaking Latinxs living in the US. As far as I know, nobody has claimed that the term is unpronounceable in English so the critique is irrelevant to the use of Latinx in this context.

There is a slippery slope from the use of Latinx to the complete degendering of Spanish. The basic argument is that adopting Latinx would eventually lead to the imposition of a completely new grammatical structure on Spanish so that terms like escuela and playa would now be escuelx and playx. To my knowledge nobody has called for the complete degendering of Spanish. Indeed, to suggest that degendering the way we describe people will lead to the degendering of inanimate objectsis dehumanizing to women and non-binary people whose gender identities are being conflated with the grammatical gender of inanimate objects.

Latinx is an elitist term that is only available to highly educated people with access to privileged spaces. While it is true that Latinx may not have wide circulation yet to claim that this makes it elitist is misleading at best. Many terms that marginalized people use to describe themselves begin on a small scale and gradually become more widely used. As an example, when I was in college a similar critique was made about the use of the term queer. Over the past 15 years the term has become more widely used with many young people now identifying as queer either in addition to or instead of as gay or lesbian. Whether the same process happens with Latinx remains to be seen. That said, efforts to promote more inclusive language will continue and to suggest that these efforts are elitist serve to derail this important conversation.

Latino is already gender neutral. The whole premise of people using Latinx or other forms of inclusive language such as Latine is that Latino is not gender neutral. To simply conclude that Latino is, in fact, gender neutral is not making a case against Latinx but instead a case against grappling with the patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies that undergird our daily language use. There are no simply solutions to these issues and people will inevitably disagree on how best to address them. But to simply suggest that Latino is gender neutral serves to reinforce the status quo.

To be clear, while I am calling for people to stop making cases against Latinx I am not necessarily making a case for Latinx either. Instead, I am making a case for taking the concerns of women and non-binary people seriously. As an educator, this means bringing these debates into the classroom. But the point of entry of these debates should not be to treat the five arguments listed above as legitimate arguments. Instead, the point of entry of these debates should be the understanding that language change is always at the forefront of political struggles and that efforts at developing more inclusive language are part of broader efforts to develop a more gender equitable future. If your only contribution to these efforts is to make cases against Latinx, somehow I suspect that your priority may not be gender equity but rather the maintenance of the status quo.